Robert Hooke's Micrographia and Christ Church Science, 1650-1670 is curated by Allan Chapman and Cristina Neagu, and will be open from 5 November 2015 to 15 January 2016. An exhibition to mark the 350th anniversary of the publication of Robert Hooke's Micrographia, the first book of microscopy. The event is organized at Christ Church, where Hooke was an undergraduate from 1653 to 1658, and includes a lecture (on Monday 30 November at 5:15 pm in the Upper Library) by the science historian Professor Allan Chapman. Visiting hours: Monday: 2.00 pm - 4.30 pm; Tuesday - Thursday: 10.00 am - 1.00 pm; 2.00 pm - 4.00 pm; Friday: 10.00 am - 1.00 pm

Article on Robert Hooke and Early science at Christ Church by Allan Chapman Scientific equipment on loan from Allan Chapman Photography Alina Nachescu Exhibition catalogue and poster by Cristina Neagu

Robert Hooke's Micrographia

and Early Science at Christ Church, 1660-1670

Micrographia, Scheme 11, detail of cells in cork.

Contents Robert Hooke's Micrographia and Christ Church Science, 1650-1670 Exhibition Catalogue Exhibits and Captions

Title-page of the first edition of Micrographia, published in 1665.

Robert Hooke’s Micrographia and

Christ Church Science, 1650-1670

When Robert Hooke’s Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries thereupon appeared in early January 1665, it caused something of a sensation. It so captivated the diarist Samuel Pepys, that on the night of the 21st, he sat up to 2.00 a.m. reading it. People were amazed, and to some degree horrified, to see fleas and flies depicted in the same anatomical detail as one might see a lion among the King’s beasts in the Tower of London menagerie. And in 1676, it would inspire the Restoration playwright Thomas Shadwell to invent the prototypical ‘mad scientist’, Sir Nicholas Gimcrack – who, among other crazy stunts, studied mouldy cheese under his microscope – in his comic box-office sensation, The Virtuoso (or ‘Scientist’).

For Micrographia opened up a whole new world of natural wonders that appealed on so many levels, to a wide range of people, from serious men of science to comedy playwrights. It was sumptuously produced, containing 38 ‘Schemes’, or engraved plates – making it a beautiful picture-book as well – and was written in an English style that would have been accessible to anyone who could read the 1611 Bible, a Shakespeare play, or even the popular chapbook tale, Jack the Giant-Killer. Micrographia was therefore a pioneer work in what we would now call ‘the public understanding of science’, taking a whole string of Hooke’s brilliant and original scientific researches and placing them in the public arena. It was an approach to the ‘new science’ of experimentation which derived from the inspirational writings of Sir Francis Bacon (1560-1626), and was now firmly embedded in the policy of the newly-founded Oxford-inspired Royal Society of London. But who was Robert Hooke, and what was his motivation?

Dr Robert Hooke, F.R.S., M.A., M.D. Robert Hooke was born in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, 18 July 1635 (O.S.), the son of the Revd John, a learned Royalist clergyman. Intellectually precocious, a gifted artist, and an instinctive deviser of working models, Hooke went up to Westminster School around 1648/9, and on to Christ Church in 1653. At Oxford, he was ‘talent-spotted’ by the Revd Dr John Wilkins, Warden of Wadham College, and became a member of Wilkins’s ‘Club’ of scientific friends, which in 1660 became the Royal Society. In Oxford, between 1653 and 1662, Hooke devised working model flying machines, observed the moon through telescopes, assisted Thomas Willis and the Hon. Robert Boyle in their pioneering chemical researches, dissected human and animal cadavers, devised machines for grinding lenses, and invented the first spring-balance escapement for portable clocks and watches – among other things! Hooke never took a formal degree, but after the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, Oxford’s new Chancellor, Lord Clarendon, would bestow an M.A. degree upon him, no doubt as an acknowledgement of established achievement. Hooke would soon come to reside in London, as Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, Bishopsgate, in the heart of the City, where he would live as a convivial bachelor don to his death in 1703. And his Professorship would be held in tandem with his – largely unpaid – Curatorship of Experiments at the Royal Society, which was also located in Gresham College. Then after the Great Fire of London, in September 1666, Hooke would be appointed

Surveyor to the City (his old Oxford friend Sir Christopher Wren becoming Surveyor to the King), to be responsible for the rebuilding of post-Fire London. An appointment which would enable him to make a fortune through architectural consultancies, while implementing regulations to design a more fire-proof City. Robert Hooke was clearly a man of prodigious energy, capable of cherishing a love of classical scholarship alongside architecture, fine drawing, music, original research into chemistry, medicine, engineering, astronomy, and, of course, microscopy.

Portrait of Robert Hooke in Christ Church by Rita Greer. No authentic portrait of Robert Hooke is known to survive, but the contemporary artist and portrait painter, Rita Greer, has reconstructed Hooke’s face from detailed ‘pen-portraits’ left by friends who knew him well. The present portrait show Hooke in his Tom Quad rooms,

surrounded by his instruments, books, inventions, and discoveries, with Tom Quad and the cathedral tower in the distance.

Micrographia

Micrographia is much more than a collection of superlative microscopic observations and fine-art drawings. It is also an explicit agenda for a new type of science: the science of the newly-established Royal Society, no less. In fact Hooke spells this out in the magisterial ‘Preface’ to his masterpiece. For since the Creation, so he tells us, humanity’s understanding of nature, from plants to planets, had been limited to what our unaided senses could teach us.

But the ‘magnifying glasses’ of his subtitle had changed all that: from Galileo’s (and Oxford’s Thomas Harriot’s) telescopic observations of the moon in 1609 to recent microscopical observations of insects. For lenses revealed wonders unimagined by Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy, and the great scientific writers of antiquity. In his ‘Preface’ Hooke styled optical and other scientific instruments ‘artificial organs’ that strengthened and bestowed stunning new powers of perception on our natural senses. And this, to Hooke, lay at the heart of the new science of the Royal Society, which was not only to produce a veritable cascade of fresh, internationally-verifiable facts about nature, but also to inaugurate a new, progressive, approach to science itself. For each generation of improved instruments revealed yet more wonders invisible to less-refined instruments: physical wonders extending from the complexity of the eye of the common fly (Observation 39) to newly-discovered stars visible in the Pleiades cluster and the Orion Nebula (Observation 59). In Robert Hooke’s view, therefore, science was not a static thing that simply described the natural world, but was innately inquisitive, progressive, ever-expanding, and dynamic. It was profoundly instrument-based, as ever-improving technologies gave us the power to see forever deeper into the natural world. These technologies, moreover, were not just optical, but also mechanical, magnetic, physical, and chemical, each designed to investigate its own particular realm of nature – whether chemistry, meteorology, astronomy, geomagnetism, or even applied mechanics, such as the physics of springs.

The beautiful Frontispiece to Micrographia (see illustration), for example, contains inset pieces which were not in themselves microscopic, and which are discussed in the ‘Preface’. Most notable among them is Hooke’s ‘wheel barometer’: his design for a much more accurate barometer, the ‘wheel’ referring to the circular scale against which a moving needle would record very small variations in air pressure as measured from the mercury in the tube. (Hooke, Boyle, Wren, and their Christ Church and Wadham friends in Oxford in 1659 had been the first to realise that variations in the level of mercury in a glass tube were caused by changes in weather conditions, thereby opening up the new science of physical meteorology.) Micrographia’s Frontispiece also featured Hooke’s design for a new type of optical lathe, whereby lenses of a hopefully superior quality might be made relatively quickly and reliably. Robert Hooke’s natural turn of mind was that of the experimental physicist or science-based engineer, directed towards how living things worked and functioned as machines. He was not primarily a naturalist, who compared and classified flowers, insects, or animals. It should be understood, however, that this concern with nature’s inner mechanics was itself seen within an essentially providential view of nature, which epitomised the early Royal Society’s way of thinking. For at the outset, in Observations 1-5, Hooke examines several beautifully-fabricated human creations under the microscope, including the edge of a finely-honed razor, a sharp needle, and

some fine gossamer silk, and notes how rough and crude they look at high magnification.

Cells in Cork, Scheme 11. The first scientific depiction of cellular structure in nature.

The reason why natural objects became more beautiful when magnified was because: ‘he that was the Author of all these things, was no other then [sic] Omnipotent; being able to include as great a variety of parts and contrivances in the yet smallest Discernable Point, as in those vaster bodies . . . such as the Earth, Sun, or Planets’ (p. 2). For to Hooke, like most other Royal Society Fellows, God was the Supreme Artificer, and their science contained a clear theological dimension. Hooke’s functioning structures or machines approach to the natural world is evident in the text accompanying most of his Observations of plant and animal specimens. Observation 18 ‘Of the Pores of Cork’: cells and plant physiology This Observation is famous in so far as it represents the first example in science of a living ‘cell’ being described and named. Hooke was fascinated by the structural symmetry of the cells, and, by counting and multiplying them, computed that in one linear inch of cork there must be more than 1,000 individual tiny cells, or 1,259,712,000 in a cubic inch! (p. 114). This natural structural beauty in something so commonplace as cork must have taken away the breath of many Micrographia readers. Hooke coined the word ‘Cell’ simply because the identical and perfectly-arranged structural units reminded him of the ‘small Boxes or Bladders of Air’ in a honeycomb, which he also suggested accounted for the light weight of cork (p. 114). Yet what could their function be? He suggested, in the wake of Harvey’s theory of blood circulation, 1628, which Hooke and his Christ Church friends Thomas Willis and Richard Lower would go on to confirm experimentally (see below), that the cells conveyed a succus nutritius or plant juice – perhaps a botanical equivalent to blood in animals. So in Hooke’s observation of cork one finds a breath-taking structural matrix of cells that, he speculated, conveyed nutritious fluids by some kind of hydrodynamic process. Of course, Hooke had no concept of the true biology of the cell as we think of it today. This would have to wait another 200 years until Rudolph Virchow’s Cellular Pathology (1858).

Observations 37, 38, 39 ‘Of Flies’: an essay in aeronautical engineering In Micrographia Hooke presents the first scientific studies of insects made with the microscope. These include the subsequently iconic flea (Observation 53), showing in detail a body covered with interlocking, flexible armoured plates, the legs, and the head, as well as spiders (Observations 47, 48). In both of these cases, however, Hooke is especially interested in the natural engineering of insect anatomy: their body structures, leg mechanisms, and muscles. And this approach continues in his description and drawing of the blue fly. One thing that fascinated Hooke about the blue fly was why it emitted a buzzing sound when flying (like the bee and the wasp), whereas moths and butterflies were silent? The reason, of course, lies in their wing structure, for while butterflies move their large, air-absorbing, down-covered wings slowly, the fly has to move its smaller, hard, ‘glassy’ wings very rapidly – hence the buzzing. Hooke tells us that he managed to persuade a vigorous blue fly to settle feet-down upon a blob of glue on the rounded end of a quill, so that while its wings were free to beat, it could not fly away (see illustration of the Fly, Scheme 26, p. 172). Hooke then tilted the quill to different angles, causing the fly to ‘think’ that it was flying upwards, sideways, or straight ahead. By examining the fly at various angles of tilt with a good magnifying glass, he was able to identify the wing-beat

patterns corresponding to particular directions of flight: or how the creature performed different aeronautical manoeuvres. It was not for nothing that Hooke came up to Christ Church in 1653 on a ‘singing man’s place’, or a choral scholarship (though the Parliamentarians had already ended all liturgical singing), for he clearly possessed musical talents. Hooke’s musical ear enabled him to define the precise musical pitch, or changes in air vibration, that corresponded with specific movements of the fly’s wings. Though he cites no precise calculations in Micrographia, he had clearly established some by 8 August 1666, when Samuel Pepys recorded in his Diary that: ‘He [Hooke] did make me understand the nature of Musicall sounds . . . [they being caused by] . . . a certain Number of Vibracions proper to make any tone, he was able to tell how many strokes a fly makes with her wings (those flies that hum in their flying) by the note that it answers to in Musique during their flying.’ Sadly, Pepys had forgotten the details! Hooke’s work on the blue fly was much more than just a microscopic description of an insect: it was, perhaps, the first coherent essay on aeronautical engineering. Natural aeronautical engineering, no less, looking at wing beats, speed, air movement, and direction, and speculating about the composition of the muscular structures capable of providing the necessary energy for such rapid motion, the fly’s respiratory system, and even the creature’s large, complex, multi-lens eyes, enabling it to see in several directions at once – its navigation system.

The Head of a Fly, Scheme 24, showing the insect’s large, multi-lens eyes.

In Hooke’s study of the blue fly one begins to appreciate how his mind worked, and how Hooke the microscopic entomologist was the same Hooke who, in 1655, had been working with Dr Wilkins in an attempt to build a mechanically-powered flying machine. (Hooke, Diary, 11 February 1675). Observations 6, 9, 10, 58: light, colours, and the wave theory Robert Hooke possessed a powerful sense of visual beauty. As a boy, he had received some training in art from the great Sir Peter Lely, and his artistic talents are conspicuously displayed in his Micrographia plates: Hooke’ s own drawings. Similarly, his work as an architect, along with that of his friend Sir Christopher Wren, shows how both these scientific gentlemen combined art with science, geometry, mathematical elegance, symmetry, and engineering. For optical studies, Hooke tells in Observation 58, have the power to open up ‘a large window . . . into the Shop of Nature’ (p. 234). In Micrographia Observation 10, Hooke, in his love of and bedazzlement with colour, announces what would become a cornerstone of optical physics: the wave theory of light. Since antiquity, colour had been understood as a sort of corruption of pure, celestial, white light. From his microscopic study of mineral mica, mother-of-pearl, and other colour-generating substances, however, Hooke had come to a different conclusion by 1664. Light was a physical, mechanical ‘pulse’, or wave, of a force which we would now call energy. And like all waves, it had flowing peaks and troughs – just like the waves of the sea upon a beach. Could it be, Hooke suggested, that one cusp of the wave generated the impression of redness as it passed through the eye, while its opposite cusp generated blueness, with an intermixing of both in between to give us greens, yellows, and oranges? Hooke drew this conclusion by devising experiments which led straight off from his observations of mica and other colour-generating substances. When he refracted sunlight down a long conical flask of water, for example, Hooke was able to obtain reds, blues, and some intermediary colours by tilting the flask to different angles, to simulate, as it were, the redness of sunset and the blue of the zenith. From this and other experiments detailed in Micrographia, Hooke challenged the classical theories of colour being simply corrupted white light. Instead, he formulated a new, mechanical, vibrative , or ‘undulatory’ model of light: a model which would, in turn, be responsible for stimulating the young Sir Isaac Newton’s subsequent prism experiments, as Newton told the Royal Society on 19 February 1672 (Philosophical Transactions 6. 80, 1672, p. 3075). Hooke’s wave model of light, however, differs from that accepted today, as developed by Thomas Young and others in the early nineteenth century, for Hooke saw only one geometrical wave, the colours being a product of the wave’s changing impact-planes upon the retina. Young and other researchers would show that individual colours possessed their own slightly different, yet very precise, frequency amplitudes. Observation 16 ‘Of Charcoal’: a new chemistry of combustion In the same way that Hooke proposed a new model for light and colours, so in his studies of charcoal he would develop the premise that ‘Fire’ was not so much an element – the accepted explanation since classical Greek times – as an aspect of a chemical process. This conclusion, however, only confirmed and substantiated his findings in the airpump combustion experiments conducted with the Hon. Robert Boyle between c. 1658 and c. 1662. Beginning with a microscopic study of the structure of charcoal, Hooke asks how the brittle, blackened substance retained the grain and other structural features of the original wood. Yet if wood were burned in an open fire, all structure was destroyed, and only grey ash remained. Could this have something to do with the air? For in an open fire, there was no limit to the amount of air that could speed along the combustion, whereas charcoal was produced by toasting the wood in an almost air-tight space. So what was the chemical nature of air, with relation to heated wood? The airpump experiments had taught Boyle and Hooke that in different states of compression or attenuation air could sustain or suppress flame. Likewise, their experiments on the combustion of gunpowder, and the strange fire-provoking properties of its principal ingredient ‘nitre’ (potassium nitrate, or KNO3) made them wonder how ‘fieriness’ could also be locked up in a white crystal salt. Could there be a condition of the air which made it fiery, or an aggressive chemical menstruum or solvent, a state which would come to be styled ‘aerial nitre’? Now to our modern understanding of combustion, this nitrous

menstruum (or solvent) appears similar to oxygen, though it must be emphasised that neither Hooke nor any of his contemporaries had any real concept of a chemically-specific gas. That had to wait another century. In Observation 16, Hooke describes an experiment. He packed a vessel with fresh wood chips and stoppered it, and heated in a furnace. Now it was well known that if, after heating, the vessel was allowed to cool, it would be found to contain charcoal, for this was how charcoal was manufactured. Yet if one took the vessel out of the fire and opened it while still hot, so that the air got at the still-toasting wood chips, then the whole mass spontaneously burst into flames and was reduced to ash. Why was this so? Hooke wondered if the ‘nitrous’ or fiery part of the air had a combustive power, especially when things were heated, making it devour the heated flammable ‘sulphurs’, or combustive parts of objects such as wood. Indeed, without his realising it, these ‘nitre’ experiments were some of the earliest studies in ‘flashpoint’ chemistry. And all beginning from microscopic observations of wood and charcoal! Observations 59 and 60: of the ‘Fixed Stars’ and ‘The Moon’ The last two Observations in Micrographia have nothing whatsoever to do with microscopes, yet continue to pursue the ‘magnifying glasses’ agenda laid out in the subtitle, for these Observations were made with powerful telescopes. As Hooke was fully aware, it had been the refracting telescope after 1609 which had become the prototypical ‘artificial organ’ that had transformed humanity’s understanding. For two matched glass lenses in a tube had shown the astronomers of the earlier generation that the universe was a profoundly different place from that which was ancestrally visible to the naked eye. And what the telescope had done for the heavens, the microscope did for the realm of the very tiny, making the natural world of 1665 seem very different from that of 1600. By the 1660s, telescope technology had progressed by leaps and bounds beyond the spectacle-lens instruments of Harriot and Galileo. In Micrographia and elsewhere, Hooke spoke of using telescopes of 12, 36 and more feet focal length, with lenses up to 3½ inches in diameter, set upon great masts, and capable of magnifying (as we can calculate from his details) some 170 times. The rapidity of development in telescopic seeing power over 50 years was very much at the heart of the Micrographia message, for when looking at the fixed stars in Observation 59, Hooke could see far more stars in the Pleiades cluster than Galileo had seen with his original telescope in 1610. Moreover, he could, with his latest telescope, see even more stars in the Orion Nebula than had the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens F.R.S. a mere ten years before. In short, telescopes were improving all the time, and with every increase in optical technology, more and more shoals of increasingly distant stars came into view. So how vast could the universe be? In short, ‘magnifying glasses’ had transformed our ideas of cosmology over a few decades, in the same way that they had presented a new realm of the microscopic to our understanding. It is in Observation 60, however, that Hooke truly breaks new ground in astronomy, when he asks how the moon’s craters may have been formed. This line of thinking developed from his making of the first highly-detailed cartographic drawing of a single lunar formation: the crater Hipparchus. He proposes two models, both considered viable by present-day lunar geologists. Firstly, the craters may have been caused by bombardment, or by objects from space crashing into the moon before its surface had fully hardened. Hooke even took the moon into his laboratory, as it were, in an ingenious experiment. He dropped pistol balls into a tub of viscous pipe-clay, and found that they produced very crater-like impact holes. Secondly, he argued that the craters were similar to Etna, Hecla, Tenerife, and other terrestrial volcanoes, and could have been caused by ancient lunar volcanic processes. He also tested this idea experimentally, by blowing air beneath the surface of a pot of boiling alabaster, and found that this too produced beautiful crater-like formations on the surface of the alabaster. By holding a lighted candle at different altitudes inside his darkened laboratory, Hooke found that his artificially-produced craters looked remarkably like the real thing, at different stages of the lunar phase.

Scheme 38. This double plate shows Hooke’s telescopic drawing of the Pleaides star cluster. Also included is his detailed drawing of the lunar crater Hipparchus. By way of scale, this whole crater, top to bottom, occupies less than 1/30th of the size of the half-moon.

And because matter ejected from a lunar volcanic eruption fell back down again, to form the crater’s ramparts, Hooke said this clearly indicated that the moon must possess its own independent pull of gravity: a thing unproven up to that time! In his telescopic observations and laboratory experiments described in Observation 60, Robert Hooke became the founding father of modern lunar geology. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Micrographia was one of the most influential books of the age. For it spelled out how the new precision instrument-based, experimental approach to knowledge was already transforming our understanding of the natural world, on all levels: from the complex cellular structure of cork, to combustion chemistry, to the formation of lunar craters, and on to the most distant stars in a seemingly infinite universe. Yet Robert Hooke was not the only early Christ Church man to enjoy a Europe-wide reputation as a scientist of brilliance.

Richard Hakluyt:

Elizabethan geographer and cartographer

The first of these was Richard Hakluyt, a Herefordshire man of Welsh ancestry, who came up to Christ Church as a Westminster Queen’s Scholar in 1570. An Anglican clergyman, a dignitary of both Bristol Cathedral and Westminster Abbey and a friend of the Queen herself, Sir Francis Drake, and William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Hakluyt was a ‘cosmographer’, lecturing in geography, cartography, and the new transatlantic and global discoveries at Christ Church.

Indeed, geography had been the first science to show that the ‘experimental method’ – in this case, the experiments were done by men in ships with compasses and astronomical instruments – had the power to fundamentally revise that body of knowledge which Western civilisation inherited from ancient Greece and Rome. For it had shown that writers such as Ptolemy and Strabo had got things badly wrong when they theorised about the globe beyond the Mediterranean. Hakluyt’s works were fundamental in the development of our understanding of the north American continent in particular, for while he himself was not an explorer, he knew people like Sir Francis Drake. He then compiled, collated, and published a vast body of new geographical data in his Divers Voyages touching the Discovery of America (1582), Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1598-1600), and other works. And then there were Hooke’s Christ Church contemporaries.

Title page of Robert Burton's copy of Principal Navigations.

Thomas Willis’s Cerebri Anatome (1664)

and the founding of neurology

Thomas Willis was a local lad, for while born at Great Bedwyn, Wiltshire, he had grown up partly at North Hinksey, Oxford, before entering Christ Church in 1637. Originally, the devout young scholarship boy had planned to enter the Anglican priesthood like his mentor, Canon Thomas Isles, but the Civil War and the abolition of the Church of England prevented this. Instead, Willis switched to medicine: inspired, it was said, by helping Mrs Isles as she distilled and made medicines for the local poor (Martha Isles was perhaps Christ Church’s first ‘lab chemist’). Willis turned out to be an experimentalist and clinician of genius: one of the iconic English physicians, after whom a ward is still named (Acute General Medicine) in Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital. An avid dissector, he was especially fascinated by the anatomy of human and animal brains, his Cerebri Anatome becoming one of the academic cornerstones of brain function, or, as Willis styled it, ‘neurologie’. In Cerebri Anatome Willis began to study specific regions of the brain, and trace nerves running from them to particular parts of the body, to initiate our understanding of the voluntary, involuntary, and ‘mental’ aspects of the brain. Willis saw the brain and body as machines in their function, though as the seat of the immortal soul, he styled the cortex the earthly abode of the immortal soul, ‘the living, breathing Chapel of the Deity’ (Pordage’s translation, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’). It was in Cerebri Anatome that Willis announced and illustrated his discovery of that circular artery at the base of the brain, in humans and certain higher animals, which supplies blood to both hemispheres of the brain, even if a left or right carotid or vertebral artery has become blocked. This discovery overturned the centuries-old physiological truism that each carotid only supplied blood to its own side of the brain, via a rete mirabile (‘wonderful network’) of left and right branching blood vessels. This discovery, probably made in Willis’s dissecting room, just a couple of hundred yards down Merton Street from the back entrance from Christ Church (and a two-minute walk from the present Christ Church Library), would immortalise his name in the history of medicine: the ‘Circle of Willis’. Willis took his neural researches still further in Pathologia Cerebri (1667), and also dissected the brains of animals (De Anima Brutorum (1672). Hooke, as a ‘graduate student’ in the late 1650s, had assisted Willis in his researches into the chemistry of fermentation: did fever patients become hot because their blood was fermenting? Then in his Pharmaceutice Rationalis (1674-5) Willis became the first clinician to define the characteristics of and christen the disease diabetes mellitus (Latin: ‘honey-sweet'), although the term ‘diabetes’ itself had previously been used by Galen. (Sadly, however, diabetes in its various types would not become treatable until Sir Frederick Banting’s and Charles Best’s discovery of insulin after 1921.) Thomas Willis was also a friend of Sir Christopher Wren, who made several of the anatomical drawings in his Cerebri Anatome. It is interesting to think that Wren, then Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford and soon to become the most famous of all British architects, was also an accomplished anatomical draughtsman, who no doubt stood alongside Willis at the dissecting table, pen and drawing board at the ready! (This was when Hooke was living in London.) Willis was both doctor and good friend to Gilbert Sheldon F.R.S., Archbishop of Canterbury and donor of Oxford University’s Sheldonian Theatre; and I suspect that Cerebri Anatome may be the only treatise on neurology to be dedicated to an Archbishop. Before his sudden death from pneumonia in 1675, Thomas Willis also served as physician to His Majesty King Charles II, patron of the Royal Society.

Thomas Willis, Cerebri Anatome (‘Anatomy of the Brain’) The base of the human brain, showing the great circular artery that supplies both hemispheres with blood. It is fed by the carotid and lesser

arteries coming up the neck. This ‘Circle of Willis’ would provide a key to the understanding of the brain and play a significant role in establishing the science of neurology. (Drawing by the young Christopher (later Sir Christopher) Wren of Wadham College.

Richard Lower F.R.S: cardiologist and clinician

A Cornishman by birth, Richard Lower (1631-1691) was a contemporary of John Locke, both at Westminster School and then at Christ Church, where both men were influenced by Thomas Willis. They would also have known Hooke, their junior by a few years, at Christ Church.

Like Willis, Richard Lower was a clinician of genius, and his Tractatus de Corde (1669) (in many ways completed our understanding of the ‘gross anatomy’ of the cardiovascular blood, air, and respiratory system. A system for the circulation of the blood first posited on the strength of abundant experimental data by William Harvey in De Motu Cordis (1628), and subsequently fine-tuned by the researches of Willis, Lower, Hooke, and various Continental physiologists between c. 1628 and 1670. In the Tractatus, Lower establishes what is now an accepted truism: namely, that the heart is a muscle, and that the systolic, or contractive, action which drives arterial blood into the aorta is an essentially mechanical action, like that of a water pump. Harvey and several other early ‘circulationists’ had been of the view that the blood’s motion through the heart was due to some kind of spontaneous effervescence or chemical frothing that was somehow brought about by contact with the air in the lungs: a view touched upon by Willis in his fermentation researches. The Tractatus consisted of five sequential sections, or Chapters. Numbers 1 to 3 deal with the detailed anatomy and function of the heart, including the action of the valves in controlling the blood flow, and their place in the blood circulatory system. Chapter 4, however, outlines researches undertaken by Lower – building upon prior work by Sir Christopher Wren, Hooke, and others – into intravenous injection and blood transfusion, including Lower’s successful sheep-to-man

transfusion before the Royal Society in 1667. Chapter 5 discusses ‘chyle’ and the transformation of the digestive juices into blood. Also fundamental to Lower’s work were experiments conducted in conjunction with Robert Hooke, probably in London, into the air-lung-heart relationship, which Hooke had published in 1667. For what still baffled physiologists before this time was exactly why and how the blood passed from dark (venous) to light (arterial) in its heart-lung-heart-aorta transit, which lay at the centre of the blood circulation action: a series of chemical-physiological puzzles stemming from Harvey’s theory with which Willis, Hooke, Wren, and Lower all wrestled. And like Willis, his teacher, Richard Lower has a John Radcliffe Hospital ward named in his honour.

And while no one had any concept of a chemically-specific gas, such as oxygen, in 1667, colour-changes in the blood were coming to be understood as chemically based: as a specific part of the air making dark blood turn pink. This seemed somehow related to the ‘nitrous’, ‘fiery’ part of the air discussed in Hooke’s Micrographia Observation 16 ‘Of Charcoal’, and would be elegantly expounded in John Mayow F.R.S.’s. Tractatus quinque medico-physici (1674). Mayow, of Wadham and All Souls Colleges, was a member of the Oxford and Royal Society experimental circle. His experiments would show that what he styled ‘aerial nitre’ was both responsible for the bright colour of arterial blood and the chemical agent necessary for combustion. John Locke F.R.S: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

It is hard to ascertain the impact of John Locke’s Essay upon Western thought, other than to say it was huge: not only in Great Britain and Europe, but also in North America. And that impact extends down to today, especially when we add in the influence of his parallel masterpiece Two Treatises on Government (1690), which established the intellectual foundation of negotiated, non-autocratic constitutional government.

Locke came up to Christ Church from Somerset, via Westminster School, in 1652, the son of an officer in the Parliamentary Army. And while primarily a classical scholar and a Christ Church Student (tutor) in Greek, he was captivated by the new science. Inevitably he would have known Hooke, Willis, and Lower, was a member of John Wilkins’s Experimental Club in Wadham, and in 1659 was attending a private chemistry course in the laboratory of the Oxford apothecary John Clerk (or Clark). He was also interested in medicine, and, in addition to other College duties, found time to take a Bachelor of Medicine (B.M.) degree in 1674, serve as a medical tutor, and act as physician to his College friend and political ally the First Earl of Shaftesbury. John Locke, therefore, had a thorough understanding of the ‘new science’, but in addition to the lab work, he was fascinated by the philosophical problems that it posed. For the Experimental Method epitomised in Micrographia ran contrary to the ancient traditions of intellectually-based, syllogistic, deductive science inherited from the Greeks. Experimental science, rather, consisted in ‘putting nature to the torture’, as Sir Francis Bacon had put it, in extracting new facts from nature, then checking them against other facts, instead of making a string of deductions from a single observation. This was the problem which Locke addressed in his Essay:

an attempt to systematise the conceptual framework of the new science, analyse how the human mind processed information, and answer the more abstract-thinking critics. Locke’s objective is aptly summed up in his ‘To the Reader’: ‘The commonwealth of learning is not at this time without master-builders . . . Boyle . . . Sydenham . . . Huygenius and the incomparable Mr Newton, with some others of that strain . . . it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way of knowledge.’

In short, the great scientists of the age were making profoundly important factual discoveries: his task as their ‘under-labourer’ was to establish their context, and evaluate them philosophically. The Essay is a large and complex work extending over four sections, but the ‘scientific’ part of its message might be summarised thus: at birth, our minds are a blank, with no preconceived or ‘innate’ ideas; sensory experience teaches us all we know; sense experiences are stored as memory; from them, we assemble ideas; simple ideas derive from simple facts, such as fire being hot; complex ideas are built up from a store of simple ideas, and can include fanciful notions such as mermaids (from having seen women and fish) or, more importantly, the reasoning that enables us to perform progressive sequences of experiments which can lead to a fundamental change in how we view ‘reality’. In a nutshell, the Experimental Method is not to be confused with blind empiricism, as its critics sometimes argued; instead, it possesses an intellectual cogency that is no less powerful than that of Euclidean geometry or Aristotle’s logic. In the Essay, then, John Locke made a powerful and enduring intellectual defence of the ‘Experimental Method’ of scientific research.

The Revd John Ward:

chemist, experimentalist, and medical enthusiast

As an undergraduate, John Ward matriculated at Magdalen Hall, a medieval Hall subsequently re-founded as Hertford College, before transferring to Christ Church. Like many clergymen of the day, Ward was passionately interested in the new science of the Royal Society, and especially after taking his M.A. in 1652, moved among scientific and medical friends including Hooke, Willis, Lower, Wilkins, and Locke. In 1662, the bachelor Ward became Vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon, though regularly returning to Oxford , as well as to London, to see scientific friends, accompany doctors on their rounds, and walk the wards of St Bartholomew’s Hospital. John Ward kept a detailed diary which records his passion for experimentation. It describes chemical laboratory experiments, dissections of human cadavers, post-mortems, and surgical operations. Though not trained as a doctor, he was clearly – like many clerical colleagues – learned in medicine, and may well have ‘physicked’ his parishioners in Stratford. His diary records contemporary experiments in Oxford with the novel aurum fulminans, or ‘banging gold’: a complex gold-salts preparation which was touch-sensitive, and hence challenged the classical idea that fire (rather than cold percussion) was necessary to create fire. Likewise, he mentions aurum potabile, or ‘drinkable gold’, which contemporaries hoped might be a universal medicine, but which was in reality no more than a dangerous emetic! Ward’s manuscript diary (in addition to recording valuable gossip about the Shakespeare family) is a fascinating scientific document. It is now preserved in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., although a microfilm version is available in the Library of the Museum of the History of Science, Broad Street, Oxford. Selections from the Diary were published in 1839 (see bibliography below). John Ward died in 1681, aged 62.

John Dwight: Christ Church’s first industrial scientisT About the same age as Robert Hooke, John Dwight was around Christ Church in the late 1650s and early 1660s. Said to have been a Gloucestershire farmer’s son, he worked as an assistant to Boyle in his private laboratory, where, no doubt, he learned his practical chemical skills. He took a Bachelor of Civil Laws, B.C.L., degree at Oxford in 1661, becoming an ecclesiastical administrator at the Restoration and holding the office of Registrar to the Diocese of Chester. He seems, however, to have fallen out with John Wilkins, whom he must have known both in Oxford and in London scientific circles, after Wilkins became Bishop of Chester in 1668. This led Dwight to change his career direction, for using his practical chemical skills, he developed a ceramic process which enabled him to produce the first fine, high-quality salt-glazed porcelain ware – or ‘china’ – in England. This was at his factory at Fulham, London. He left no academic writings, although some of his fine ceramic vessels still survive. So it was a scientifically-minded Christ Church lawyer who established the English fine porcelain industry. Dwight died in 1703 aged about 70.

Bibliography Allan Chapman, England’s Leonardo: Robert Hooke and the Seventeenth-Century Scientific Revolution (Institute of Physics, Bristol and Philadelphia, 2005). K. Dewhurst, Willis’s Oxford Lectures (Sandford Publications, Oxford, 1980). Kenneth Dewhurst, Willis’s Oxford Casebook, 1650-1652 (Sandford Publications, Oxford, 1981). Robert G. Frank, Jnr., Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists: a Study of Scientific Ideas (Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, 1980). Robin Hildyard, ‘John Dwight’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (O.U.P., 2004). Robert Hooke: The Diary of Robert Hooke, ed. H. W. Robinson and Walter Adams (Taylor and Francis, London, 1935). R. Hooke, Posthumous Works, ed. Richard Waller (London, 1705). R. Hooke, Philosophical Experiments and Observations, ed. William Derham (London, 1726). J. T. Hughes, Thomas Willis (1621-1675). His Life and Work (Royal Society of Medicine, London, 1991). Paul Kent and Allan Chapman, Robert Hooke and the English Renaissance (Gracewing, Leominster, 2005). Anthony Payne, ‘Richard Hakluyt’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (O.U.P., 2004). The Diary of Samuel Pepys, a new and complete transcription, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (London, 1970-83). Marcus B. Simpson, Jnr., ‘Richard Lower’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (O.U.P., 2004). Thomas Willis, Cerebri Anatome (London, 1664). English translation: Samuel Pordage, ‘The Anatomy of the Brain’, in The Remaining Medical Works of That Famous and Renowned Physician Dr Thomas Willis (London, 1681). The Diary of the Revd John Ward A.M., Vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon. Extending from 1648 to 1679 from the original MS preserved in the Library of the Medical Society of London, arranged by Charles Severn, M.D. (London, 1839). The manuscript is now in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. Allan Chapman 23 September 2015

Hooke Micrographia exhibits and captions

Micrographia: or some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses. : With observations and inquiries thereupon. Author: Hooke, Robert, 1635-1703. Publisher Details: London, : Printed by Jo. Martyn, and Ja. Allestry, printers to the Royal Society and are to be sold at their shop at the Bell in S. Paul's Church-yard. Publication Date: M DC LX V. Format: [36], 246, [10] p., XXXVIII leaves of plates (some partially folded) : ill. ; fol. Notes for Christ Church - Main Library, Special Collections: Hyp.P.47 Micrographia: or, Some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses, with observations and inquiries thereupon. Author: Hooke, Robert, 1635-1703. Publisher Details: London, : Printed for James Allestry, printer to the Royal Society, and are to be sold at his shop, at the Rose and Crown in Duck-Lane. Publication Date: MDCLXVII. Format: [36], 246, [10] p., XXXVIII leaves of plates (some folded) : ill. ; fol Notes for Christ Church - Main Library, Special Collections: Arch. Sup. E.3.3 Bookplate: Engraved bookplate of Christ Church, Oxford, eighteenth century. - Binding: Seventeenth-century plain calf binding; blind-tooled fillets and cornerpieces; chain hole at foot of fore-edge of lower board; paper tab at head of fore-edge of upper board. - MS additions: MS Additions: Bookplate annotated: 'Duplicate' (eighteenth or early nineteenth century?); crossed out. Photographs Frontispiece This plate depicts Hooke’s microscope along with its lamp illumination system. In the upper part of the plate we see Hooke’s barometer and his lens-grinding machine. p. 60. Scheme VI. Experiments leading to Hooke’s ‘wave’ model of light. p. 88. Sch. XIV. The exact geometry into which water ‘crystalizes’ when frozen. p. 144. Sch XV. The stings of nettles. p. 125. Sch. XII. Mould when magnified. p. 115. Sch.XI. Cork cells. In this Observation Hooke first uses the word ‘cell’ in a descriptive biological context. (The physiological understanding of cells, however, would not be established until Rudolf Virchow in 1858.) p. 167. Sch. XXII. Peacock feather section. (Scale: Hooke says that the feather structure depicted in Fig. 3 represents 1/32nd of an inch, or 0.7938mm.) p.182. Sch. XXVI. A blue fly. Hooke’s study of the blue fly, and accompanying experiments to discover how it flew, made this Micrographia Observation a foundational treatise of aeronautical engineering. p. 203. Sch. XXXII. The ant. p. 210. Sch. XXXIV. The flea. p. 244. Sch XXXVIII. The moon and stars. The lunar crater is ‘Hipparchus’. In size, it occupies about 1/35th of the lunar diameter. Though maps of the whole moon, with named features, dated back to Thomas Harriot (of Oriel College) in July 1609, and were commonplace by 1665, Hooke, in this drawing, was the first astronomer to make a detailed survey of one single, relatively small, lunar formation. Working replica of the microscope, probably made by Christopher Cock (or Cox) around 1663-4, for Robert Hooke. A. Chapman , 1975. Microscope, c.1860. A Chapman. Microscope, c.1960. Please look through the eyepiece. You will see a slide of the wing of a fly, similar to that depicted Hooke in Micrographia. An essay concerning humane understanding. : In four books.. Author: Locke, John, 1632-1704. Publisher Details: London: : Printed by Eliz. Holt, for Thomas Basset, at the George in Fleetstreet, near St. Dunstan's Church. Publication Date: MDCXC. Format: [12], 362, [22] p. ; fol Notes for Christ Church - Main Library, Special Collections: e.3.6 Bookplate: Armorial bookplate pasted on verso of first free upper end-paper, of "Isaac Lemyng Rebow, of Colchester.". - Bookplate: Armorial bookplate of John Gurdon Rebow, with motto "In arduis viget virtus", pasted on inside of upper board. - Binding: Full sprinkled (mottled?) calf, with blind double fillets near edges of boards and additional set of blind double fillets parallel to spine, gilt roll on edges of boards, textblock edges sprinkled red, 5 raised bands, gilt tooling and red leather label with gilt lettering on spine. - Note: Binder's waste pasted on inside of upper board, printed in English, partly in black letters, a devotional text: "[par.] And after that, these prayers following, all devoutly kneeling, the minister first pronouncing with a loud voice, The Lord be with you. Answer. And with thy Spirit. ...". - MS additions: Additional slip of paper inserted loose at front, bearing a list of four expenses in ms. ink: "Expended of Chelmsford ... Laid out ffor a bottle of Craime ... pd ffor 6 roeses at [?] ... Expended for beer ditto ...". - Provenance name: Lemyng Rebow, Isaac, d. 1735. - Provenance name: Gurdon Rebow, John. - Provenance note: This volume was stolen from Christ Church library at some point during 1994, was recovered by the police and returned to the library in 1995; a bookplate has been removed from the inside of the upper board; the spine label with the shelfmark has also been removed. - Provenance note: In ms. ink on inside of upper board: "J.L. Rebow 1727". - Prev. shelfmark: In ms. pencil on John Gurdon Rebow's bookplate on inside of upper board: B.8. - Size: 33 cm.

The posthumous works of Robert Hooke, M.D. S.R.S. Geom. Prof. Gresh. &c. : containing his Cutlerian lectures, and other discourses, read at the meetings of the illustrious Royal Society. In which I. The present deficiency of natural philosophy is discoursed of, with the methods of rendering it more certain and beneficial. II. The nature, motion and effects of light are treated of, particularly that of the sun and comets. III. An hypothetical explication of memory; how the organs made use of by the mind in its operation may be mechanically understood. IV. An hypothesis and explication of the cause of gravity, or gravitation, magnetism, &c. V. Discourses of earthquakes, their causes and effects, and histories of several; to which are annext, physical explications of several of the fables in Ovid's Metamorphoses, very different from other mythologick interpreters. VI. Lectures for improving navigation and astronomy, with the descriptions of several new and useful instruments and contrivances; the whole full of curious disquisitions and experiments. Illustrated with sculptures. To these discourses is prefixt the author's life, giving an account of his studies and employments, with an enumeration of the many experiments, instruments, contrivances and inventions, by him made and produc'd as curator of experiments to the Royal Society. Author: Hooke, Robert, 1635-1703. Publisher Details: London: : Printed by Sam. Smith and Benj. Walford, (printers to the Royal Society) at the Princes Arms in St. Paul's Church-yard. Publication Date: 1705. Format: [8], xxviii, 209 [i.e. 210], [2], 279-572, [12] p., [15] leaves of plates (many folded) : ill. ; fol Notes for Christ Church - Main Library, Special Collections: OP.1.7 Bookplate: Library bookplate of Orrery bequest (type 1). - Binding: Full calf, double blind fillet perimeter frame, blind-dotted central frames with floral ornaments at corners, gilt-rolled edges to binding, text-block edges sprinkled red, rebacked. - Provenance name: Orrery, Charles Boyle, Earl of, 1674-1731. - Provenance note: Listed in A catalogue of the library of Charles late Earl of Orrery (Library records 22). - Size: 33 cm. Photographs p. 155. The comet of 1680-81. Also, the comet of August 1682; (later known as ‘Halley’s Comet’). p. 283. Fossilised ammonite, or ‘Snake Stones’. In his Earthquake Discourses, delivered before the Royal Society between 1664 and 1700, Hooke argued that fossils were the ‘petrified’ or stony remains of long-dead creatures. Hooke also argued that the earth was very ancient, and that a vast period of time had elapsed between God’s original Creation and the subsequent Creation of Adam and Eve, as described in the Book of Genesis. During this period, indeed, the earth had gone through many transformations and earthquakes. For example, early species had become extinct (and become fossilised), while God had probably created new ones – perhaps even from the old! Hooke also argued that his native Isle of Wight had once been attached to the Dorset and Hampshire coast, as similar fossil strata can be found on both sides of the Solent. (Canon William Buckland of Corpus Christi College, then Christ Church, and Oxford’s first Professor of Geology, would argue similarly in the 1820s.) p. 284. Large ‘nautilus’ shell, cut longitudinally to show the exquisite internal chamber structure. * One should note that Hooke’s ideas of an ‘ancient earth’, fossils, and extinction occasioned no ecclesiastical retribution. Indeed, far from it, for in 1691 Hooke’s old friend the Most Revd. John Tillotson F.R.S., Archbishop of Canterbury, conferred a Lambeth M.D. degree upon him. p. 502. ‘Tabula XI’. Designs for two telescopic instruments for measuring celestial angles. Philosophical Transactions, 1667, p. 542. Astronomical micrometer. Robert Hooke made no claim to the invention of the micrometer. This was first devised by William Gascoigne of Leeds in 1639, and a description of it posthumously communicated to the Royal Society in 1667. Yet the instrument inspired Hooke, who not only used it for making astronomical observations, but adapted its measuring-screw principle both for his own instruments and for those he designed for the Revd John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, at Greenwich. The micrometer is used for the measurement of very tiny angles through the telescope. A pair of precision screws (40 threads to an inch) control the motions of two upright brass pointers. The micrometer and its box are inserted into a telescope, so that when an observer looks through the eye-lens, the pointers appear in sharp focus in the field of view. The screws are carefully adjusted until they exactly enclose an astronomical object, such as the moon or the sun. By noting the exact number of turns, and part-turns, on the dial, the astronomer can calculate the exact angular size of the object under observation. Fully working replica. A. Chapman, 1980. Lectiones Cutlerianæ, or, A collection of lectures: physical, mechanical, geographical, & astronomical. : Made before the Royal Society on several occasions at Gresham Colledge. To which are added divers miscellaneous discourses. Author: Hooke, Robert, 1635-1703. Publisher Details: London: : Printed for John Martyn, Printer to the Royal Society, at the Bell in S. Pauls Church-yard. Publication Date: 1679. Format: 6 pts. ([12], 28; [8], 78, [2]; [4], 32; [2], 54; [8], 112; [4], 56 p., [17] leaves of plates (some folded)) : ill., map ; 4⁰ Description: An attempt to prove the motion of the earth by observations [1674].--Animadversions on the first part of the Machina coelestis [1674].--A description of helioscopes [1676].-- Lampas: or, Descriptions of some mechanical improvements of lamps & waterpoises [1677].--Lectures and collections [Cometa & Microscopium] [1678].-- Lectures de potentia restitutiva, or of spring explaining the power of springing bodies [1678].

Related Titles: Attempt to prove the motion of the earth from observations ; Animadversions on the first part of the Machina coelestis of the honourable, learned, and deservedly famous astronomer Johannes Hevelius ; Description of helioscopes ; Lampas: or, Descriptions of some mechanical improvements of lamps & waterpoises ; Descriptions of some mechanical improvements of lamps & waterpoises ; Lectures and collections ; Cometa ; Microscopium ; Lectures de potentia restitutiva, or of spring explaining the power of springing bodies Notes for Christ Church - Main Library, Special Collections: OS.3.2 Bookplate: Library bookplate (no. 4) of Christ Church, Oxford. - Binding: Mottled calf, double blind fillet perimeter frame, triple blind fillet central frame with corner ornaments, gilt-rolled edges to binding, text-block edges sprinkled red and blue, - Imperfect: Lacking plate? - Provenance note: Not obviously listed in Orrery catalogue. - Prev. shelfmark: OS.4.29. - Prev. shelfmark: Arch. Inf. H.1.6. - Prev. shelfmark: Arch. Inf. E.5.4. - Prev. shelfmark: C.7.17.Strat. - Size: 23 cm An attempt to prove the motion of the earth from observations made by Robert Hooke Fellow of the Royal Society.. Author: Hooke, Robert, 1635-1703. Publisher Details: London, : Printed by T. R[oycroft]. for John Martyn printer to the Royal Society, at the Bell in St. Pauls Church-yard. Publication Date: 1674. Format: [8], 28 p., [1] folded leaf of plates ; 4° "Hooke explains in his preface that this is the first of his Cutlerian Lectures to be published and that others will afterwards be printed in the same format so that they may be bound together. Notes for Christ Church - Main Library, Basement Special Collection: Z.180/12 Binding: Paper wrapper. - Size: 24 cm. - Bound with: Boxed with: 13 other items. A description of helioscopes, and some other instruments Author: Hooke, Robert, 1635-1703. Publisher Details: London, : Printed by T.R. for John Martyn ..., Publication Date: 1676. Format: [4], 32 p., II folded leaves of plates : ill. ; 4° "This was the third Cutlerian Lecture to be printed. Notes for Christ Church - Main Library, Special Collections: A.54 (1) Binding: Card boards sewn onto four supports, covered in vellum. - Imperfect: Spine completely detached and missing. - MS additions: MS. inscription on recto of first free endpaper: "A.54.". - Size: 21 cm. - Bound with: 12 other items. Balance wheel of a watch. In the late 1650s, while still at Christ Church, Hooke devised his original mechanism whereby a thin, curved, spring could be used to regulate the going of watches, thereby vastly improving their time-keeping capacity. This came from Hooke’s experimentally-derived realisation that the ‘force’(or energy) needed to bend a spring was in exact mathematical proportion to the ‘force’ that the spring would release.In a mechanical watch, a powerful mainspring drives the wheels and fingers (a 15th-century invention). In earlier watches, however, a relatively crude ‘breaking’ balance mechanism had been used to make the watch tell the time. But as the mainspring ran down, the watch ran progressively more slowly, thus losing time. Hooke realised, however, that as the energy entering and leaving a delicate spring attached to the watch’s ‘balance’, or ‘braking’ mechanism always stayed the same whether or not the mainspring was fully-wound, then the energy which it gave out would also stay the same, making the watch keep accurate time. Hooke’s balance spring watches became increasingly popular in the late 1670s. Indeed, in 1675 he even presented one to H.M. King Charles II. The watch, made by his friend Thomas Tompion, was inscribed ‘Robert Hook inven. 1658’. Hooke gave a detailed description of his work on elasticity in his Cutlerian Lecture De Potentia Restitutiva, or Of Spring, 1678. 'Hooke's telescopic drawing of the comet of 1677, where he undertakes the first detailed study of the internal structure of a single comet. He identifies three principal zones of the comet: the small, spherical nucleus; the long stem, or 'medulla' streaming in a straight line behind the nucleus, and; the coma of glowing light around the nucleus and which streams behind to form the tail. Hooke tried to create a comet in the laboratory, by immersing a metal ball in a tall glass vessel containing acid. He saw streams of bubbles (what we now know to have been hydrogen) coming from the ball, and forming a remarkably comet-like tail. This led Hooke to suggest that comets are made of a solid material that was somehow dissolved away by some sort of force as they approached the sun. Inset is Hooke's drawing of Jupiter. Note its system of belts. This pictures also includes one of the first drawings of what later astronomers would style Jupiter's 'Great Red Spot'. 'Robert Hooke's design for an early 'Equatorial Mount' to facilitate the easy tracking of astronomical objects across the sky. The long axis is inclined to point at the pole star, so that when the axis is rotated, the attached telescope and quadrant angle-measuring instrument can smoothly follow a star or planet across the sky. This is a beautifully-engineered design, with large balancing weights to keep the instrument perfectly poised. In this design, Hooke even proposed the addition of a large clockwork motor to turn the axis at exactly the same speed at which the sky rotates. This would have made the instrument 'track' the stars automatically. It has been suggested that the man shown making an observation with the instrument may have been Hooke himself.

Measuring a zenith star position with a vertical telescope. 'Astronomers in the 17th century were trying to measure a star 'parallax angle' in the hope of finding a physical proof of the earth's motion in space. If, indeed, the earth was moving around the sun, then surely, one should be able to detect a slight, regular, six-monthly shift in star positions; a 'parallax angle'. Hooke suggested that the zenith was the best place to search for such a tiny angle, as there would be no atmospheric 'refraction', or distortion; the light coming to us in a straight line. To this end, he set up a 36-foot focal length telescope in the vertical. So that then he lay on his back and looked up the tube, he would see zenith stars passing the meridian overhead. He hoped that, using a delicate measuring device, he would be able to detect a small, six-monthly parallax angle. By this time, 1669, Hooke had left Christ Church to become Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, in the City of London. He therefore set the telescope to extend through an upper floor, the attic, and the roof of his College rooms. And while even this instrument was not sufficiently sensitive to detect a star parallax, he did detect another angle. This was probably caused by a phenomena later styled the 'Aberration of Light' when it was decisively detected by the Revd. Professor James Bradley, of Balliol College, in 1728. By that date, however, instruments had become even more accurate. This provided the first clear proof that the earth moved in space, and that Copernicus's theory of 1543 was physically true. Robert Hooke, however, had been the first to demonstrate the zenith-measuring method. Robert Hooke was the inventor of the 'Universal Joint' mechanism, whereby a mechanical force could be directed around corners with uniform precision. He used the device as early as 1674, to indicate the readings on a dial upon an astronomical quadrant, as the quadrant's position changed as the instrument was made to 'track' a celestial object across the sky. And being the brilliant technical communicator that he was, Hooke shows the Joint both fully assembled, and also with its parts 'exploded', so that an engineer or craftsman could easily replicate his design. This Helioscopes plate also contains what looks like some curious writing. This, with its accompanying text, was an example of 'Natural Character' writing. One of Hooke's early scientific Oxford inspirers, the Revd Dr John Wilkins, Warden of Wadham College, and later, Bishop of Chester, was active in trying to develop a new 'philosophical' (or scientific) language which was as exact as mathematics and had none of the ambiguities of more traditional languages. It was a vision shared with many other scholars both in Great Britain and across Europe. 'Tabula III' provides a specimen of this new 'Natural Character' language, and its script. Gravity. in 'Attempt to Prove'. These are Hooke's postulates for a Law of Gravity, over 12 years before Newton. Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth (1674). 27 -28. It is popularly believed that Sir Isaac Newton 'discovered gravity'. And while Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687) provided the decisive key that would establish the Inverse Square Law and precise mathematical formulation of Gravitation, Newton was truly 'standing on the shoulders of giants' by 1687. Within the 17th century alone, these gravitational researchers had included Johannes Kepler, Galileo, Christian Huygens, Jeremiah Horrocks, and of course, Robert Hooke. Hooke had reached his conclusions about gravity from both astronomical observations and from laboratory experimental procedures. In his Attempt to Prove the Motion of Earth, however, Hooke presented his three premises, or conclusions about gravitation. Considering the significance of these premises, it is not for nothing, therefore, that John Aubrey, Edmond Halley, and others felt that Newton was failing to pay his intellectual debts by refusing to acknowledge Hooke's contribution to gravity research. Hooke Law of Spring. De Potentia Restitutiva; Of Spring (1678). Hooke's extensive researches into elasticity, which he first began in Christ Church in the 1650s led to his formulation of he famous 'Law of Spring' in1678. Originally expressed in Latin, it stated: 'Ut Pondus sic Tensio'; or, as Hooke himself translated it, 'the weight is equal to the tension'. Or, as one might say in modern terms; the energy put into a spring is equivalent to the energy which the spring gives out.

Cerebri anatome: : cui accessit nervorum descriptio et usus. Author: Willis, Thomas, 1621-1675. Publisher Details: Londini, : Typis Tho. Roycroft, impensis Jo. Martyn & Ja. Allestry apud insigne Campanæ in Cœmeterio D. Pauli. Publication Date: M.DC.LXIV. Format: [30], 56, [2], 57-240 p., [12] folded leaves of plates : ill. ; 8⁰ Notes for Christ Church - Main Library, Special Collections: On.5.2 Bookplate: Library bookplate (dated 1904) of Christ Church, Oxford, pasted over 1859 letterpress book label of Henley Parochial Library. - Binding: Full calf, double blind fillet towards edges of boards, blind-dotted rectangular frame in centre with ornaments at corners, gilt-dotted edges to binding, text-block edges red, rebacked. - Imperfect: Lacking plates. - Provenance name: Henley Parochial Library. - Provenance name: Aldrich, Charles, 1681-1737. - Prev. shelfmark: 794 (Henley Parochial Library). - Size: 16 cm. The base of the human brain, showing the great circular artery that supplies both hemispheres with blood. It is fed by the carotid and lesser arteries coming up the neck. This ‘Circle of Willis’ would provide a key to the understanding of the brain and play a significant role in establishing the science of neurology. (Drawing by the young Christopher (later Sir Christopher) Wren of Wadham College. In the early 1660s, Wren was Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, and was a lifelong friend of Robert Hooke. He was also a friend of Willis. Both Wren and Hooke would go on to become major architects, and were superb draughtsmen. Anatomy, after all, was seen as God’s architecture in the human body. Schematic drawing of the autonomic nervous system. (‘Autonomic’ signifies that part of the nervous system controlling ‘involuntary’ or automatic body functions, such as breathing, digestion, and heart action). In the Cerebri, Willis traced the vagus (Latin, ‘wandering’) and other nerves from the brain to many parts of the human body, thereby demonstrating how the brain controls all bodily functions. Note the complex array of nerves controlling the synchronized functions of the four-chamber heart. (Drawing by Dr Richard Lower, Willis’s pupil and colleague.) De anima brutorum quæ hominis vitalis ac sensitiva est, exercitationes duæ. : Prior physiologica ejusdem naturam, partes, potentias & affectiones tradit. Altera pathologica morbos qui ipsam, & sedem ejus primariam, nempe cerebrum & nervosum genus afficiunt, explicat, eorumque therapeias instituit. Author: Willis, Thomas, 1621-1675. Publisher Details: Oxonii. : E theatro Sheldoniano. Impensis Ric. Davis. Publication Date: Anno Dom. M.DC.LXXII. [1672] Format: [56], 16, 33-565 [i.e. 563], [19] p., VIII leaves of plates (5 folded) : ill. Notes for Christ Church - Main Library, Special Collections: Om.4.32 Bookplate: Library bookplate (1737) of Wake bequest (type 2). - Binding: Mottled calf, double gilt fillet towards edges of boards, gilt ornaments at corners, gilt-rolled edges to binding, text-block edges coloured red and green, marbled endpapers. - Note: Advertisement leaves in state 2 (the first page of the advertisements bears the original end of the text, p. "565", and the errata are printed on a separate leaf and pasted over this). - Note: Leaf g2 misbound before leaf g1. - MS additions: In pencil on front free endpaper: "Formerly in Wake: a Wake book"; on rear free endpaper: "342". - Provenance note: Not obviously listed in Orrery catalogue. - Prev. shelfmark: Wt.5.9. - Prev. shelfmark: Wt.5.10. - Size: 23 cm. In spite of its title – On Brutes – this work was also dealt with comparative human and animal physiology. This plate show a dissection of the human brain through its mid-line, separating the two hemispheres. Note the detailed attention that Willis pays to the interior of the cerebellum, the organ of the brain suspended at the back, located above the top of the neck. His dissection illustrates several key structural details of the interior of the cerebellum. Although most of Willis’s suggested functions of the cerebellum are now known to be incorrect – such as musicality being lodged in that organ – his nerve-tracings enabled him to make huge progress in advancing our modern knowledge of the brain. Crucial to this was his argument that particular structures in the cerebellum and larger brain-mass (cerebrum) have specific physiological functions. Thomae Willis med. doct. Opera omnia, : nitidius quàm unquam hactenus edita, plurimum emendata, indicibus rerum copiosissimis, ac distinctione characterum exornata. Author: Willis, Thomas, 1621-1675. Publisher Details: Amstelaedami, : Apud Henricum Wetstenium. Publication Date: MDCLXXXII. Format: 6 pt. in 1 v. ([16], 182 [i.e. 180] p., [1] leaf of plates; [4], 123, [1] p., XIII leaves of plates ([5] folded); [4], 146, [6]; [4], 41, [3] p., I leaf of plates; [8], 210, [8] p., VIII leaves of plates ([1] folded); [8], 295 [i.e. 298], [6] p., VII leaves of plates ([2] folded) : ill. (port.) ; 4⁰ Uniform Title: Works. 1682 General Note: Added engraved illustrated title page. Title reads: Th. Willis Opera omnia. General Note: Each of the 6 pt. has divisional half-t.p. and separate pagination and register. Pt. 1 has title "Thomae Willis Diatribae duae prior agit de fermentatione, sive de motu intestino particularum in quovis corpore; altera de febribus, sive de motu earundem in sanguine animalium: his accessit Dissertatio epistolica de urinis"; pt. 2 has title "Thomae Willis Cerebri anatome, nervorumque descriptio & usus"; pt. 3 has title "Thomae Willis Pathologiae cerebri et nervosi generis specimen in quo agitur. De morbis convulsivis, & scorbuto"; pt. 4 has title

"Thomae Willis Affectionum quae dicuntur hystericae et hypochondriacae pathologia spasmodics vindicata contra responsionem epistolarem Nathanielis Highmori, M.D. Cui accesserunt Exercitationes medico-physicae de sanguinis accensione, et motu musculari"; pt. 5 has title "Thomae Willis De anima brutorum quae hominis vitalis ac sensitiva est, exercitationes duae quarum prior physiologica ejus naturam, partes, potentias, & affectiones tradit; altera pathologica morbos qui ipsam & sedem ejus primariam, cerebrum nempe & nervosum genus afficiunt, explicat, eorúmque therapeias instituit"; pt. 6 has title "Thomae Willis Pharmaceutice rationalis, sive Diatriba de medicamentorum operationibus in humano corpore". Notes for Christ Church - Main Library, Special Collections: Om.3.24 pt.1-4 Bookplate: Library bookplate (18th cent.) of Christ Church Oxford. - Binding: 17th cent. English blind tooled mottled calf, very eroded. - Prev. shelfmark: Arch. Sup. C.3.6. The remaining medical works of that famous and renowned physician Dr Thomas Willis : of Christ-Church in Oxford, and Sidley Professor of Natural Philosophy in the famous University. Viz. I. Of fermentation. II. Of feavours. III. Of urines. IV. Of the accension of the bloud. V. Of musculary motion. VI. Of the anatomy of the brain. VII. Of the description and use of the nerves. VIII. Of convulsive diseases. With large alphabetical tables for the whole, and an index for the explaining all the hard and unusual words and terms of art, derived from the Latine, Greek, or other languages, for the benefit of the meer English reader, and meanest capacity. With eighteen copper plates. Author: Willis, Thomas, 1621-1675. Publisher Details: London, : Printed for T. Dring, C. Harper, J. Leigh, and S. Martyn, and are to be sold by Robert Clavell, at the Peacock in St Paul's Church-yard, Publication Date: MDCLXXXI. Format: [12], 178, [4], 192, [34], 106 p., [14] leaves of plates (some folded) : ill., port. ; fol Notes for Christ Church - Main Library, Special Collections: Oo.2.13 Bookplate: Library bookplate (dated 1904) of Christ Church, Oxford. - Binding: Twentieth-century cloth. - Provenance name: Ritchie, D. S. - Provenance note: Donation letters from D.S. Ritchie to Christ Church pasted in, dated 1947. - Size: 33 cm. Tractatus de corde, item de motu & colore sanguinis, & chyli in eum transitu. : Cui accessit Dissertatio de origine catarrhi, in qua ostenditur illum non provenire à cerebro. Author: Lower, Richard, 1631-1691. Edition: Editio tertia, & ultima.. Publisher Details: Amstelodami, : Apud Danielem Elsevirium. Publication Date: M.DC.LXXI. [1671] Format: [16], 237, [3] p., 6 folded leaves of plates : ill. ; 8° Notes for Christ Church - Main Library, Special Collections: Wt.8.24 Bookplate: Library bookplate (1737) of Wake bequest. - Binding: 17th cent. English blind tooled calf. - Provenance name: Wake, William, 1657-1737. - Provenance note: Listed in Archbishop Wake's library catalogue (Library records 20). - Prev. shelfmark: Wt.7.19. This work would become one of the cornerstones of cardiology. In it, Lower built upon the work of Dr William Harvey, whose De Motu Cordis (1628) first demonstrated that the blood circulated around the body, and also that of Thomas Willis on nerve action. In De Corde, Lower shows that the heart is a muscle, controlled by the autonomic nervous system, and that in its ‘systolic’ or contracting phase it drives blood into the aorta and other arteries under mechanical pressure. In this way, it sustains the blood’s circulation through a pumping action.

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